The Invisible Philosopher: Hans Blumenberg

Hans Blumenberg (1920-1996) is a posthumous celebrity in post-war German philosophical circles, partly thanks to Sibylle Lewitscharoff’s 2011 novel, Blumenberg. Now, without irony, a new film about Hans Blumenberg is entitled “The Invisible Philosopher.” That titular adjective would irk Blumenberg, who fancied himself a world-class philosopher, master of grand abstractions inside Joycean matryoshka, long before he achieved fame outside his home country of Germany. The invisibility designation derives partly from an anti-selfie regimen Blumenberg enforced, despite being an avid photographer himself. More photographs of Abraham Lincoln are available than of Blumenberg.

Early biographical details contribute to Blumenberg’s invisible philosopher moniker. During the National Socialist period, Blumenberg was forced into hiding. He had been on a path to become a Roman Catholic priest, but when the National Socialists took power, Blumenberg found himself in a precarious situation due to his mother’s Jewish ancestry. Compelled to quit the seminary in 1940, he took up work in a Drägerwerk factory. In 1944, the National Socialists sent Blumenberg to a labor camp for those of mixed blood. His former employer, Heinrich Dräger, who had joined the National Socialist party in 1933, managed Blumenberg’s release, after which Blumenberg went into hiding with the help of his future wife’s family until after the war.

Blumenberg’s self-imposed invisibility continued after the Allies divided Germany when he became what we would call today a “public philosopher,” writing for the Düsseldorf News. A friend and tennis partner happened to be an editor at the paper and asked Blumenberg to contribute commentary on a variety of topics – medicine, literature, attitudes about New Year, the changes in higher education in Germany, the legacy of magic – , and Blumenberg, a student of esotericism, chose to publish many of these pieces under a pseudonym, Axel Colly.

Using pseudonyms, hiding from the Nazis – purposeful invisibility was a strategy for safety, and complemented philosophy’s long-standing esoteric tradition extending back at least to Plato’s Seventh Letter (Plato: “We succeeded by veiled allusions” [332d]), a missive written in fear. Once Blumenberg died, his invisibility, Greta Garbo-like, morphed into a catalyst for enhanced visibility. Hiders spawn seekers.

In the last decades of his life, Blumenberg turned down opportunities to speak abroad, including an invitation by Karsten Harries to give a presentation at Yale. According to the translator of Blumenberg’s protohistory of theory (The Laughter of the Thracian Woman), Blumenberg also rejected invitations to socialize, preferring to stay home in Münster.

A coming out party of sorts for Blumenberg is planned. Recently, a group of scholars working with Blumenberg’s daughter, Bettina, announced the launch of the Blumenberg Society, which will hold its first international conference in October 2019, an effort to manifest the importance Blumenberg believed he deserved. The 2019 calendar is marked as well for the publication of The Blumenberg Reader. An academic Blumenberg industry will ensure the erasure of Blumenberg’s invisibility.

Blumenberg has taken a lesson from his fellow Catholic James Joyce when it comes to feeding one’s critics. Blumenberg cites Joyce as a writer who partially programmed his critical reception with Ulysses. Blumenberg writes, “It was for them [the exegetes] above all, if not for them alone, that the abundance of connections and allusions was scattered and concealed.” Equivalently, Blumenberg gifts to members of the hermeneutical guild, people Blumenberg calls “the nobility of the desk,” texts that weave a Byzantine pattern of allusions, anecdotes, and references “to occupy the reader for her whole life.” It’s only a matter of time before some academic claims that Blumenberg’s 20th-century feuilletons about lions set in motion the insatiable desire for cat memes on the interwebs in this century.

Among the items brought to light by scholars since Blumenberg’s death are a commentary on Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem – Blumenberg’s response is caustic (“[She’s] completely insensitive to the political”) – and an essay on prefiguration, the “missing chapter” to Work on Myth (1979) dealing with the mythical dimensions of Hitler’s decision to invade Stalingrad, and with Blumenberg’s personal distaste for Napoleon. Given Blumenberg’s experiences during the National Socialist period, one might have anticipated Blumenberg would have been more vocal with his political views after the war. He does call Martin Heidegger “the incarnation of the little man,” but writes immediately after in the same 1988 essay addressing the question of how to evaluate those who paid Nazi party dues “to the end” that “he [Heidegger] probably wasn’t a ‘Nazi.’” Perhaps someday documents from Blumenberg’s Nachlass will reveal further details about Blumenberg’s political positions.

As things stand now, Blumenberg looks to be somewhere to the left of Ernst Jünger and to the right of Jürgen Habermas. The alleged last letter Blumenberg wrote, weeks before his death, seems to express resolute allegiance to the Catholic church. That letter has been published fittingly in the Internationale katholische Zeitschrift Communio. To appreciate that little about Blumenberg follows straight lines, readers need to place that alleged last letter in the context of the tale Blumenberg tells in his book on Bach’s St. Matthew Passion (1988), which is really about western humanity’s relationship to gods. The tale is tied to Ulrich Thoemmes, who attended the famed Katharineum in Lübeck where Blumenberg went to school around the same time in the early 1930s. One day Thoemmes’s teacher interpreted the saying “The fear of God is the beginning of wisdom” to mean that students should fear their teachers. Blumenberg notices that the interpretation changes dramatically depending on how you read the genitive (Die Furcht des Herrn ist der Weisheit Anfang), and concludes one should interpret the sentence to mean God fears the beginning of human wisdom.

While a philosophical heavyweight in Europe, Blumenberg has yet to gain much traction in the Anglophone world. Blumenberg’s lack of philosophical fame, especially outside Europe, could be attributed to the enormity of his work, both its size and its demands on readers and translators. For instance, Cave Exits/Entrances (1989) is over 800 pages of Henry James-level German that requires a Sherpa reader (joke courtesy of Russell Baker in his essay about navigating through Proust). In that book, Blumenberg provides, in part, an application of Plato’s Republic to assess his own time. According to Angus Nicholls, Blumenberg’s application posits that “the cave and the shadows that are projected onto its walls are state institutions that protect the ‘poorly adapted’ human beings and prevent them from being dazzled by the direct light of the sun, enabling relief.” The relief includes a kind of free thinking that permits the inhabitants the possibility of imagining life outside the cave or an alternative cave, the idea that life could be otherwise. The security provided by the cave leads to reflection, questioning, the compost from which philosophy sprouts once it gets some light outside the den of deception.

Cave Exits/Entrances doesn’t serve Plato’s ends, since Blumenberg is hardly a Platonist. A quotation early in the book corroborates the point: “Philosophy is the epitome of unprovable and irrefutable assertions that have been chosen from the point of view of their efficiency.” The full-throated critique of Plato can be found in the chapter entitled “A State without a Cave Exit/Entrance,” in which Blumenberg describes the consequences of rule by Plato’s philosophical Archons. The bad taste Plato leaves in Blumenberg’s mouth is reinforced elsewhere, such as the essay “Fake Concern,” in which Plato’s collusion with tyrants is a leitmotif. Blumenberg puts the accuse in Syracuse.

It would be a mistake to read Nicholl’s gloss of Blumenberg’s Plato as Blumenberg’s deference to the present. Blumenberg’s massive diachronic considerations of Plato, of astronomy, of theory, of chronology, of metaphor, of myth, do not paint a picture of human beings moving from darkness to light, primitivism to sophistication. Nor is Blumenberg after some Gadamerian “fusion of horizons.” Robert Pippin offers a concise account in Pippin’s consideration of arguably Blumenberg’s most well-known book, Work on Myth: “In what is probably the most interesting aspect of his case, all mythic sense-making is treated as radically historical. There is no common, underlying savage mind; no archetypical sense-making, no ever re-emerging species-characteristic divisions and classifications in experience. What we take up, use, alter and expand in some standard narrative always represents a ’working out’ of an historically particular version of the fears and anxieties Blumenberg has identified as unavoidable in human experience.” Humans don’t so much overcome old questions as reoccupy them in new ways. Likewise, reason (logos) is not superior to mythical thinking (mythos). For Blumenberg, mythos and logos are simply different forms of rationality.

The cave metaphor encapsulates a Blumenbergian theme: “the absolutism of reality.” In Blumenberg’s account, human beings, unlike gods, are insufficient, vulnerable, fragile creatures. Humans constitute a category of animal that flees. We live in fear of all sorts of things beyond our control – earthquakes, floods, comets that could strike Earth, storms. Everything humans accomplish is contingent, impermanent, due to the unpredictable reality in which we exist. We feel safest at a distance, as spectators, as Blumenberg reports in Shipwreck with Spectator (1979). The contemporary form of this distance is illustrated by theater – “only when the spectators have been shown to their secure places can the drama of human imperilment be played out before them.” Blumenberg quotes Abbé Galiani: “The more safely the spectator sits there and the greater the danger he witnesses, the more intense his interest in the drama. This is the key to the secrets of tragic, comic, and epic art.”

Blumenberg’s 1986 book, Lebenszeit und Weltzeit (Lifetime and Worldtime), the title of which manifests Blumenberg’s debt to Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology, seeks to describe the unstable nature of human life as humans contend with contemplating two kinds of time, first the finite length of human existence juxtaposed, say, to the time from the Big Bang to the Heat Death of the universe. It’s the problem humans cannot unsee when they realize that “human history is a cosmically unnoticeable event.” In a cautionary tale, Blumenberg refers to Hitler and the “Bormann-Diktate” as an example of what can happen when someone attempts to merge these temporal modes. According to Blumenberg, Hitler tried to force world-time inside Hitler’s own lifetime; Hitler didn’t want to die unless he could take the whole world to the grave with him.  Blumenberg warns of similar dangers for all of us who might try to achieve too much within one lifetime (a version of YOLO – those who justify extreme, impulsive decisions with the phrase “you only live once”).

Forcing world-time into lifetime is what launched the careers of people like Jack and Rexella Van Impe, who preached for decades on television that the Apocalypse was nigh. Van Impe, Father of the Plural Form of Apocalypse, predicted the Tribulation Hour would come before 1980. Then, with 1980 come and gone sans Apocalypse, new signs were sought out to prove the end would come later, and then later again when the previous prophecy flopped. Being awful at augury is not a disqualification–just ask Melisandre from Game of Thrones. A secular version of the unhappy consequences of fusing world-time and lifetime plays itself out in New Zealand, where Silicon Valley’s über-rich have bought bunkers to ride out Doomsday, to take power after you and I have become nuclear bar-b-que bits. Blumenberg offers his audience an antidote to fancying the fusion of these temporal modes: acknowledge “the slowness of reason,” the title of an essay published a year after his death.

Blumenberg presents a special phrase for a related antidote: temporal indifference, a notion, rooted in Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology, which suggests that the impact of an event, like the appearance of a philosophical work, is contingent on enabling circumstances. Kant’s work is Blumenberg’s prooftext. Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason appears in 1781. Looking back, one might have thought 1781 would represent, according to Blumenberg, “the crowning glory of European Enlightenment.” Instead, it took until 1924, with the publication of Julius Ebbinghaus’s “Kantinterpretation und Kantkritik” before someone got Kant right. Blumenberg: “It was plain for all too see, Neo-Kantians in particular, that they had not been reading Kant properly. A thorough re-reading began, bringing about remarkable refinements in the understanding of Kant.”

Blumenberg’s thought might require a similar span before his works find their Julius Ebbinghaus. Scholars are busy mining the cave in Marbach for treasures in thousands of notecards and other materials Blumenberg left behind, enough to build untold academic careers. You and your grandchildren will have time for tea before a complete picture of Blumenberg becomes visible.

Bruce J. Krajewski

Bruce J. Krajewski is a translator and editor of Salomo Friedlaender'sKant for Children(forthcoming in 2024 from De Gruyter).